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a-n Artist Bursary 2018

My interdisciplinary practice is broad and spans image making, installation and dance making, so my plan had to be equally diverse involving mentoring with an interdisciplinary artist who is a bit further on; and skills based development in Tanztheatre and fabricating objects on environmental scales

Part1: 3am jazz, Tanztheatre and a week in the studio

This blog is about the Tanztheatre element, documenting a week-long intensive led by specialist Adrian Look in May 2018.

My obsessions are psychology and the body, especially the body in movement in relation to other bodies/psychologies. I have read a mountain of popular psychology books and my work is increasingly exploring psychological states.

In June 2016 I made a collaborative work with three dancers for an exhibition at SPACE, London about the failed momentum of the mourning process. Working with Francesco Milgliaccio, Robyn Holder and Marta Polak I took the role of director/choreograpaher, and conceived the concept and text that my collaborators worked from.

I felt it was a breakthrough and I wanted to make more performance work, but as I am currently un-funded paying dancers was tricky and I was finding it hard to get a new project off the ground. I trained 10 years ago, and dance regularly but as I didn’t go down the jobbing dancer route I found myself with two major obstacles:

That I lacked confidence to get in the studio and make using my own body, I didn’t feel ‘allowed’ to be there really although I spend most of my free time hanging out with professional dancers and know more dance makers than visual artists (!)

I lacked the experience of dancing other choreographer’s work, and so all I had in my body to use was my classical movement language, and that wasn’t that useful for improvising around the pedestrian, naturalistic movement that interested me. I didn’t know how to translate emotion and intention into my movements and was mechanical or OTT pantomime… it wasn’t working.

The winter before this I started to find my groove by accident. I was heart broken by an exceptional set of circumstances and threw myself into partner dancing. For over a year I spent Friday nights dancing to wailing, melancholy jazz well into the early hours of the morning accompanied by some of the best musicians and dancers on the scene, in the safety of a tiny, crowded, dark corner in Dalston as they jammed around the piano at Tiger Rag.

What I unexpectedly found was the connection with the story of the music, and with another person to counterpoint with I could improvise and express in a way that never came in the studio. I found I responded best to the music that I could find a narrative in.

So I started to take class once a week with Tanztheatre specialist Adrian Look and some longer improvisation sessions, being fascinated by Pina Bausch’s work. What I found was the the Tanztheatre technique wasn’t quite in my body enough to come through in improvisation and I was struggling to tie up the two.

So I took the week-long intensive to close the gap here and to shift my dance practice from a focus on internal mechanisms and technique, to images and communicative qualities of observed movement.

My a-n Artist Bursary supported me to attend his week-long intensive with a group of dancers and actors in Hackney in May, and I have been attending monthly group improvisation sessions with some of the same performers since then.

Six months on I have cleared a space in the studio to improvise regularly and have started to post some of these on Instagram.

Here is what the work of dancing looks like…. my goal was to stay mentally and emotionally present in the movement, from 10 am – 5pm every day for a week. By the evening is was useless! That kind of focus was totally new!

Each day we had morning class, repertoire and then improvisation and choreography. Here I am getting some feedback from one of my peers, and struggling to remember the directions. I’m dyslexic which presents huge barriers mirroring and picking up material quickly and was a reason I didn’t have the confidence to audition for performance work…. me smiling during this is a new thing!

These were my take-aways at the end of the week that I have been working on over the last six months….

Dance full out every time. I coast a lot, going through the motions is not possible with this technique, you have to be present throughout your whole body.

Connection– dancing less but dancing better as a result.

Soften my technique, hiding it in a way so the audience see’s the content not the container, the feeling not the dancer. All my feedback across jazz partner dancing a contemporary classes has followed the same lines.

Find a new variation each time you get a chance to repeat a phrase– develop you inventiveness and ability to switch feelings on demand.

Just get up, get the music on and move, do anything, no judgement

Posture and managing hypermobility-I habitually let the back of my neck go- my head isn’t always under control. Stabilise the pelvis with cross training- I also have sacroiliac dysfunction which for this week of the intensive was causing me pain and it still is as I write this six months later- physio, no excuses. Wrists- activate them.

What is your head doing? – this is a choice, mine is often strangely still….

Keep laughing when it goes wrong, do something and always finish the phrase- you are on stage until you are off.

Timing- when I’m wrong I usually manage to not loose the music even if Iv’e lost the steps- This is a strength.

Contrast- flow is good but contrast is just as good, resist the temptation to make everything to even and controlled.

Reflections

Thinking back to this time last year when I was just about to begin my activity with the support of an a-n Artist Bursary and to the steps forwards that is has enabled me to take. As well as developing my practice it has enabled me to pay other artist for their time and expertise, building my networks and contributing to sustaining other artists practices.

I have joined a performance group with Adrian Look as a dancer in a work he is choreographing for a public sharing on 11 April at The Place, London. I have created a number of solo, duet and trio works as part of the work.

A series of contact points with Eddie Peake have facilitated on on-going conversation with an other artist working in a multi-media way. It has given me a platform to pick out my stronger work and to think about how to present my practice to interested parties. It has also highlighted the slow progression of the work between meetings and the time that I need to make available if I am to scale up the ambition of my work. I have developed a plan to facilitate this and have submitted a bid to ACE’s Develop Your Creative Practice fund.

And deepening my acquaintance with Katja Larsson have allowed my to close my knowledge gap with the new materials I am making as well and building a new peer connection for talking about work. I am already starting to think about new ways of bringing together the flat shapes that I am making together with more three dimensional shapes, some of which I tried out in a pop up show in a tower block carpark on the invitation of Recreational Grounds.

Scaling up

The third component of my skills development project was to talk to someone who could help me move my making processes forwards and help me think through what the direction of this could be.

For a number of years I have been making sculptures in two ways – using large flat shapes cut out of wood and theatre-flats; and casting from plaster on concrete.

I have always been interested in the idea of the work being an environmental experience, with view points that unfold as you navigate it in space. Content being communicated through a variety of modes to give an overall impression or sense of something.

Alongside I have been developing a body of small works using casting processes in plaster, concrete and most recently Jesmonite. I wanted to get a sense of how I needed to adjust my making process with these in order to make large scale work and scale up.

These works have drawn on casting processes with flexible materials, such plastic bags and plastic tubing (packaging materials mainly) and I was having problems with work breaking- having no knowledge of what variations in mixtures I could get away with or how to shore up my makeshift moulds.

With my A-N Bursary I was able to get in contact with another artist who’s work I have been fascinated by Katja Larsson for some bespoke advice and a supported making session. She and I were in artist-led exhibition ODDS at Assembly Point Studios in 2017 and I have been following her practice since then.

Katja has been able to look at the work that I have been making and give specific advice around how much bigger I can go without breaks forming, identifying potential weak spots, as well as pointing out where my improvised moulds work and where they need more support. She has also been able to give me an idea of the materials I would need to make much larger scale works and work out a budget for up-coming funding applications.

As well as the technical feedback around a specific project, connecting with another artist around the work has given me the opportunity to extend my professional networks

Part two: a visit from Eddie Peake, October 2018

My practice has sculptural and pictorial elements which are combined in installations of varying scales and I also work with dance and movement. Current interests concern the body as a site for the energetic impact of communication blocks and disconnection. Also in the background for the last 10 years I have been involved in music festivals as a core cultural anchor and place of nourishment in my social and creative life. Interested in putting art outside the gallery scenario I currently run the visual arts programme at Green Man festival which I set up in 2016, commissioning three-four new light and digital works each year.

I had been considering two things particular to my multi-disciplinary and sometimes collaborative practice and wanted to discuss these with an artist working in a similarly broad way who was further down the road than me, who also worked in other cultural arenas in conjunction to their art practice.

Eddie Peake’s varied artistic vocabulary encompasses performance, video, photography, painting, sculpture and installation. His main focus lies in the lapses and voids inherent in the process of translating between verbal language and nonverbal modes of communication. In his collaborations he has worked with dancers and recently invited pirate jungle radio station Kool FM to take up residence in one of his immersive works. He also runs a record label called HYMN.

I have been considering the extent to which I tailor the edit of my multi disciplinary practice when approaching curators and other gate-keepers.

Eddie talked to me about painting, and how for him that was the through line in his work. His experience was that although some artists do tailor their work very neatly to the connections that they want to attract, that could be limiting to your practice overall in the long run. An approach with more possibilities might be to show the breadth of what you do and to allow people to surprise you in their interests.

Another concern I had was what is interesting and worth pursuing in the mass of exploratory work that I have been doing.

As well as reflecting that the performance work seemed to be where the most energy in my interest was he pulled out some things from the more sculptural part of my practice. I had everything out in the studio and he picked these objects out of the jumble sale style scenario, feeling that they had an energy and immediacy that was of interest.

Our conversation also underlined the importance of feedback and allowing time for the work to settle. I had work in the studio about to go into an artist-led exhibition in Bethnal Green which was unresolved in comparison to these chosen works, both of which I had made a while ago and had had time to reflect on.

New Work for Scaffold Gallery at Paradise Works Salford, May 2018

In May 2018 I was invited to make a new work for Scaffold Gallery’s group exhibition There is No Such Thing as Boredom, at Paradise Works, Salford.

The work was a response to the provocation in the title of the show and took the form of a 9 minute film on a laptop supported by an enlarged hand and shoulders of the protagonist. The film pictures the protagonist stuck in front of the computer screen facing the viewer, perhaps waiting for a response from someone, or stuck looking at their workstation. The work explores the state of boredom through movements and actions, moving from a playful feel to exasperated gestures bordering on violence towards the self.

The film was created using expressive movement techniques honed through the training I carried out with Adrian Look.